Samsung Galaxy A8 Plus Review – The Cheaper Flagship is Awesome

The Samsung Galaxy A8+ went on sale on 20th January on Amazon and priced at 32,990/- rupees. At this price this device is competing with the likes of Honor View 10 and the OnePlus 5T which in terms of specifications and performance beat the A8+ out of the park but this interesting phone from Samsung is more than specifications and performance, read out to know why.

If you compare the design with the OnePlus 5T and the Honor View 10 you’ll see that the design is completely different, in fact if you place it next to the Galaxy Note 8 you’ll see a lot more similarity in terms of design that with any other flagship killer in this price bracket. The Glass front and the glass back protected by Gorilla Glass 4 is a really premium design.

You also get ip68 water resistant which out of these three devices is the only phone to offer that which will prevent you phone from getting damaged. So despite looking the part of the phone is also perfectly durable and reliable. Samsung also excels in display too, which is 6-inch 18:9 SUPER AMOLED display with a resolution of (2220 x 1080 pixels) which is a different and unique but the display in itself if fantastic. You get 411 pixels per inch with awesome viewing angles, excellent vivid colors and deep blacks.

Specs wise the phone contains the Exynos 7885 chipset, with and Octa-Core CPU, the MALI GPU- G71. In comparison with OnePlus 5T and Honor View 10 this chipset is somewhere half in terms of benchmarks but for day-to-day usage this chipset is more than enough. Samsung is also bundling 6GB of RAM in A8+ allowing you run several apps and manage the memory really well with lots of spare memory to go.

For day-to-day task, multitasking and even gaming with high-end games you’ll find that the chipset performs really well. One major downside is Samsung refuses to push-out Android 8 Oreo until their next flagship phone the Galaxy S9 is launched which is not letting phones that are even being launched in 2018 get Android 8 out-of-the-box. This phone will get the Android 8 Oreo only after the S9 launch or around that time.

The location of the the fingerprint sensor on the A8+ is a lot more ideal than on the Note 8 and even on the Glaxy S8 and Samsung maybe using this on their future phones. The back panel is also curved and the edges are rounded off so the phone is extremely comfortable in your hand despite being a large phone and it’s relatively easy to use.

You do have Samsung’s UX to use this phone with one hand and several shortcuts and menu add ons, customization for display, the way it looks and the vividness of the display. Interestingly the phone also contains Bixby, the Samsung’s personal assistant with Bixby vision and but without the dedicated Bixby button, and with the Samsung Pay fully integrated into the phone.

Another great advantage of owning a Samsung phone is the excellent cameras. The 16-megapixel f/1.7 aperture camera at the back and several camera shooting modes in the app takes some really nice images. Typical for Samsung devices the phone does over saturate images but look fantastic on SUPER AMOLED display, video quality with Image Stabilization or Video stabilization is really good but it is restricted to a Full HD+ or the resolution of the display, we missed 4K in this price bracket on this phone.

Now an important feature for many people but you do get a dedicated Micro SD card slot and dual SIM slot. The front facing cameras are also interesting, you get dual cameras on front this time and because of that a mixture of 8-mp camera and a 16-mp camera the phone is able to give you live focus or the Bokeh effect which gives you nice portrait shots. The 8-mp camera also has a wide 85 degree field of view so if you’re taking a group selfies or want to capture a landscape in your selfies, the front facing camera will come to the rescue.

With the battery of 3500mAH and Samsung’s fast charge available with fast charger included in the box, this one is good to go for more than a day on a full battery in less than 2 hours of charging. Samsung has also included face unlock feature which is not as fast as on OnePlus 5T but works well and is secure too.

You also get the latest and faster Wi-Fi 802.11AC and Bluetooth 5.0 inside the device with NFC and the ip68 rating. It is not a performance phone and cannot be compared with the beast like OnePlus 5T and Honor View 10, but this phone is for different consumers who like the reliability and good service and support of Samsung. This phone will be great deal if it was price around 25k to 28k.